The Lucky One
by Blaire Marie
Summary: Another name goes up in lights, like diamonds in the sky. [A blogger documents Taylor Swift's coming of age and rise to fame. Based on true events. Includes appearances from Joe Jonas, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles & more]
1. Chapter 1

_February 2009_

On a bright Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, Taylor Swift is on good behavior, as usual. In high school, she had a 4.0 average. When she was home-schooled during her junior and senior years, she finished both sessions of course work in 12 months. She has never changed her hair color, won't engage in any remotely dangerous type of physical activity and bites her nails to the quick. At nineteen years old, she says she has never had a cigarette. She says she has never even had a drop of alcohol.

"I have no interest in drinking," she tells me, her blue eyes focused and intent beneath kohl liner and liberally applied eye shadow. "I always want to be responsible for the things I say and do." Then she adds, "Also, I would have a problem lying to my parents about that."

Taylor has gotten far playing Little Miss Perfect - not only was her second album, _Fearless_ , at Number One for eight weeks this winter, but she's enjoyed numerous perks, like a 10-day stay at the West Coast home of her childhood idols, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, which is where we are today. The couple, who befriended Taylor in Nashville, offered the use of their house while she is in L.A. appearing on an episode of her favorite show, CSI. The fact that Taylor's first hit single is called "Tim McGraw" (a wistful, gimmicky ballad about a separated couple who recall each other by their favorite McGraw song) is a clue to her feelings about them.

"I love Tim and Faith," she tells me as we dash about the house, which is utterly enormous, filled with gilt crosses and life-size Grecian statues, and worth about 14 million. "I think I like the bright colors in here better than the lighter ones," she says, critiquing the rooms, which seem to go on endlessly, like galleries in a museum. "I don't know. I go back and forth. You know when you walk into a furniture store, and you're like, 'Oh, that's how I'm going to decorate my house,' and then the next one you're like, 'No, _that's_ going to be the way I decorate my house'?" She giggles. "I think when I do it, I'm going to be so indecisive."

Taylor lives at home with her parents in a suburb outside of Nashville, in a big house overlooking a lake. The family was wealthy before she became a star - both of her parents have had careers in finance, which makes them particularly good advisers, and they aren't interested in their daughter's cash. One of them usually travels with her, and her father, a kind and friendly stockbroker, has just arrived, a stack of business documents in tow.

Taylor seems to have three gears (giggly and dorky; worrying about boys and pouring that emotion into song; or insanely driven, hyper self-controlled perfectionism) and, as she embarks on a wholesome afternoon activity, the third aspect of her personality comes into play. In Tim and Faith's white-marble kitchen, she attacks the task of baking mocha chocolate-chip cookies with a single-mindedness rarely seen outside a graduate-level chemistry class. She measures and sifts and whips with sharp, expert movements while her father keeps up a patter about her career.

It takes superhuman strength for a teenager to listen to her father talk at length about her personal life, and even Taylor - the goodiest goody-goody in the nation - struggles to remain polite. She's constantly worried about saying something that could be construed as offensive to her fans, and even swats away my question about her political preferences before conceding that she supports the president: "I've never seen this country so happy about a political decision in my entire time of being alive," she says. "I'm so glad this was my first election."

Her eyes dart around like a cornered cat as her dad runs on about the tour bus on which she travels with her mom. "We call it the Estrogen Express," he tells me as I jot notes in my weathered journal and tuck strands of dark hair behind my ears.

"That's _not_ what we call it," counters Taylor.

Then her dad talks about the treadmill he got for her, because she didn't want to deal with signing autographs at the gym.

"That's not why!" she yelps. "I just don't want to look nasty and sweaty when people are taking pictures of me."

But these are momentary distractions in an otherwise pleasant afternoon. Within 45 minutes, Taylor produces two dozen perfect, chewy cookies, which she offers around with a glass bottle of milk. Suddenly, she squints at the jar, and shrieks a little: eggnog. She scours the fridge but comes up empty-handed, irritated by the foolishness of her mother, whom she surmises was shopping absent-mindedly. This cannot be. Snack time is ruined. Then she blinks rapidly and composes herself.

"I didn't do that," she says, shaking her head firmly. "Mom did that."

Taylor likes to do everything the right way, and most of the time that means she likes to do everything herself. She writes or co-writes all of her songs; she's been a working songwriter since the age of thirteen when she landed a development deal with RCA Records. At fourteen, Taylor walked away from RCA's offer of another one-year contract ("I didn't want to be somewhere where they were sure that they kind of wanted me maybe," she deadpans) and put herself on the open market. She received interest from major labels but held out for Scott Borchetta, a well-regarded executive at Universal who left the company to start his own label, Big Machine Records.

"I base a lot of decisions on my gut, and going with an independent label was a good one," she says as I chew politely on a chocolate-chip cookie.

Since then, Taylor has sold 6 million of her first and second albums, making her the bestselling artist of 2008. Now she is preparing to launch her first headlining arena tour of 52 cities in April (a date at the Staples Center in L.A. sold out in just two minutes). She's benefited from a broad demographic appeal; the "Taylor Nation" ranges from country to indie-music fans to the Disney generation. Her impeccably crafted songs easily translate to pop radio, and she's clearly taken with the notion of crossing over, though she's nervous about alienating her core audience.

"You can't forget who brought you to the party, and that's country radio," she insists.

For all her high-minded business acumen, as an artist she is primarily interested in the emotional life of fifteen-year-olds: the time of dances and dates with guys you don't like, humiliating crying jags about guys who don't like you, and those few transcendent experiences when a girl's and a boy's feelings finally line up. You can't go anywhere without your best friend. You still tell your mom everything. Real sexuality hasn't kicked in yet.

Taylor won't reveal anything to me on that topic herself. "I feel like whatever you say about whether you do or don't, it makes people picture you naked," she says, self-assuredly. "And as much as possible, I'm going to avoid that. It's self-preservation, really."

Self-preservation is one of her favorite phrases, and she uses it in reference to both her professional and personal lives. She may be a five-foot-11-inch blonde, but she does not have the carefree soul that usually goes along with that physiognomy. She wants to have a long career, not get tossed away like most teen stars.

Along with the Jonas Brothers and a gaggle of young Disney stars like her pals Miley, Selena, and Demi, she's part of a backlash against the pantyless TMZ culture of earlier this decade, which proved to be a career-killer for Lindsay Lohan and her clique. Taylor admits that she was fascinated by girls like Paris Hilton when she was younger, but claims that she never thought the gossip about these women were true.

"You should never judge a person until you know the full story," she explains, matter-of-factly.

She is also certain she would never let herself get caught up in such shenanigans.

"When you lose someone's trust, it's lost, and there are a lot of people out there who are counting on me right now." She cocks her head. "Rebellion is what you make of it," she says. "When you've been on a tour bus for two months straight, and then you get in your car and drive wherever you want, that can feel rebellious..."


	2. Chapter 2

If this is Taylor's game face, it must be tattooed on, because it never drops during hours of press on a recent weekday in New York. It's a day that includes mind-numbing chatter on Sirius XM and Clear Channel, a voiceover for a new style show on MTV, and a sickeningly sweet luncheon for her L.e.i. sundress line sold at Walmart.

It's an impressive performance: Taylor engages easily with the teen-fashion journalists following her around, bantering about blow-dryers and bachelorette parties; then, she's gracious to the misshapen radio hosts, calling everyone by their names and administering warm hugs by the dozen. But there's a moment, at the Walmart luncheon, when she gets a little testy with a young fan. Taylor asks the fan where she's from, and when the girl answers, "New Jersey," she makes fun of her accent. But this is literally the only sin against a human she commits during a 10-hour day in which she's barely fed, never stops smiling and signs hundreds of autographs with a pink Sharpie pen.

This politesse is part of her character, a way of treating others taught by her loving family. Her parents intentionally raised their kids in the country, on a Christmas tree farm with a grape arbor and seven horses, in eastern Pennsylvania, while her father commuted to work.

"I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head," she tells me as we get in a chauffeured car and head to the next destination.

But her parents also prized success in the real world: They even gave her an androgynous name, on the assumption that she would later climb the corporate ladder.

"My mom thought it was cool that if you got a business card that said 'Taylor' you wouldn't know if it was a guy or a girl," she says. "She wanted me to be a business person in a business world."

Taylor rode horses competitively as a child, but her main hobby was making up fairytales and singing the songs from Disney movies by heart. At six, she discovered a LeAnn Rimes record, which she began to listen to compulsively.

"All I wanted to hear from then on was country," she says. "I loved the amazing female country artists of the 90s - Faith, Shania, the Dixie Chicks - each with an incredible sound and standing for incredible things."

She began to act in a children's musical theater company but found that she preferred the cast parties, which featured a karaoke machine, to the stage.

"Singing country music on that karaoke machine was my favorite thing in the world," she reminisces.

As is the Swift-ian way, even at eleven she was determined to "pursue other venues" where she could perform, and soon found the Pat Garrett Roadhouse, which had a weekly karaoke contest.

"I sang every single week for a year and a half until I won," she gushes. Her prize: opening for Charlie Daniels at 10:30 a.m.; he played at 8:30 at night.

Newly emboldened, Taylor began to perform the national anthem at local sports games, and even landed a gig with her favorite team, the Philadelphia 76ers. But tragedy soon befell our young songstress. It seems that her classmates did not agree that country music was cool.

"Anything that makes you different in middle school makes you weird," she says. "My friends turned into the girls who would stand in the corner and make fun of me."

She was abandoned at the lunch table. She was accused of possessing frizzy hair. She tried to fit in by joining teams but proved to be horrible at every sport. Then redemption came in the form of a 12-string guitar.

"When I picked up the guitar, I could not stop," she says. "I would literally play until my fingers bled. My mom had to tape them up, and you can imagine how popular that made me: 'Look at her fingers, so weird.'" She takes a deep breath. "But for the first time, I could sit in class and those girls could say anything they wanted about me, because after school I was going to go home and write a song about it."

This is the Taylor tale of triumph, and she likes to tell it a lot when she's interviewed. It sounds cliche, in a way (I mean, who hasn't been made fun of in middle school?) but she's managed to keep the feelings raw, and access to them is part of her appeal.

The sun is starting to set as we head downtown, near the World Trade Center site, to play a live acoustic set on the radio station Z100 for about fifty "Caller 100s" - a group that happens to be almost exclusively plain, primly dressed girls between twelve and seventeen. The fans listen raptly as Taylor chats about bad-hair days and ex-boyfriends. They hold up their camera phones, sometimes with a Sidekick in the other hand. Taylor keeps insisting that they sing along with her, and at first they're shy, but soon the scene resembles a teenage-girl "Kumbaya" session, all the alienation and hurt that they feel in their real lives melting away, replaced by a deep sense of peace.

"Taylor is so down-to-earth," gushes Darlane Shala, a ninth-grader from Manhattan. "She's just such a good person."

Afterward, she takes more photos with the girls and looks at her fan letters. The girls write about feeling like outsiders, about getting ostracized by girlfriends over misunderstandings with boys, about hating girls who make fun of other girls and not understanding why some people enjoy being so cruel.

"When I first discovered your music a few years ago, something in me opened up," says a meticulously crafted two-page letter from a high school sophomore, who included a picture of herself at the beach. "I had been feeling upset, and you told me that I'm not alone," she continues. "Your lyrics mean the world to me, and I swear they are the narration of my life." She adds that Taylor has given her a path for the future: "I wish more than anything that I could change a teenager's perspective," she writes, "the way you have done for me."

This is Taylor's primary hope for her music: she wants to help adolescent girls everywhere feel better about themselves, and in the process heal her younger self.

"In school, I loved reading _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , and I'm very interested in any writing from a child's perspective," she says as we hop into yet another chauffeured car.

At high school in Henderson, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville, (her parents agreed to move when she landed her RCA contract, at the beginning of her freshman year) Taylor's interest in country music was obviously considered normal, but she still wasn't popular. She may be pretty now, and she eventually might have abused the power that comes with being a beautiful senior girl, but when she left high school, at sixteen, she was still just a gangly sophomore.

"There were queen bees and attendants, and I was maybe the friend of one of the attendants," she says. "I was the girl who didn't get invited to parties, but if I did happen to go, you know, no one would throw a bottle at my head."

In a way, her emotional state seems to be stuck at the time when she left school. She says that she has only a half-dozen friends now - "and that's a lot for me" - and she talks constantly about her best friend, Abigail, a competitive swimmer and freshman at Kansas State, with a new nose ring and a new pet snake, doubtlessly having many experiences that Taylor may not be ready for. In fact, Taylor is a very _young_ nineteen-year-old.

"I feel like Miley, Selena and Demi are my age," she says at one point, acknowledging the fast-paced lives of her Los Angeles-based contemporaries. "It's crazy, I always forget that they're sixteen."

And in her love life, Taylor admits to being mighty inexperienced. She says that she's had her heart broken, but she's not sure if she's ever really been in love. She had a boyfriend her freshman year, a senior hockey player: "We weren't an It couple," she drawls. But there really haven't been many guys since then except for Joe Jonas, who famously broke up with her over the phone for another girl. Taylor wrote a song on her second album called _Forever & Always_ about Joe, then filmed a MySpace video with a Joe Jonas doll, during which she remarks, "This one even comes with a phone so it can break up with other dolls!" Joe later insinuated that _she_ hung up on _him_.

"I did not hang up on him," she says now, then mouths, "Omigod."

The illogic of love is unsettling to Taylor, who has a hard time understanding it with her supremely rational mind. Music, for her, is a way of expressing feelings that are largely repressed or absent. She maintains that marriage is something she would "only do if I find the person I absolutely can't live without" and "it's not my ultimate goal in life." In fact, the first two singles on Fearless ( _Love Story_ and _White Horse_ ) are about a guy that she considered dating but never even kissed. Many of her songs are not about her own personal experiences with love; about half are inspired by her friends' relationships.

"I'm fascinated by love rather than the principle of 'Oh, does this guy like me?'" she says. "I love love. I love studying it and watching it. I love thinking about how we treat each other, and the crazy way that one person can feel one thing and another can feel totally different," she tells me. "It just doesn't take much for me to be inspired to write a song about a person, but I'm much more likely to write that song than do anything about it. You know, self-preservation."

There goes that word again.


	3. Chapter 3

A couple days later, Taylor has started four days of rehearsal at a studio on the outskirts of Nashville for her upcoming tour. She picks the alfalfa sprouts out of a sandwich (she avoids vegetables, hates sushi and in general gravitates away from anything healthy) and straps on her guitar, strumming as she gives her tour manager instructions on the set list. As much as she engages in good-natured banter with her band, she's clearly in charge of this show. With a faintly sex-kitten stage presence (punctuated by many pumps of her very long arms in the air) she cues fiddle licks, restages a number and shuffles the orchestration in a mash-up. Then she stops.

"Omigod," she giggles. "For _Love Story_ the stage is going to become a church, and I'm going to get into a white dress." She bites her lip. "There's so many cool sets," she gushes. "We're going to have a giant castle!"

After rehearsal, we return to her parents' home, which is set on a promontory over Old Hickory Lake.

"In the summer, people fish off the dock," she tells me as we walk up the porch, then deadpans, "More people now. Apparently, there are more fish now."

The mantle of their living room is crammed with bulky glass awards, and posters of Taylor line the hallways. A large sitting room is devoted to racks of clothes that she has worn in performance or public, with a sign affixed that reads "Please go through: Keep or give to Goodwill." Her younger brother Austin, a sixteen-year-old lacrosse player and academic overachiever, has moved into a room on the garage level, doubtless to have some space away from the Taylor Nation, but she still lives in her childhood bedroom.

It's a small room, decorated almost exclusively in pink and purple. Her closet is itty-bitty, with clothes organized in neat rows above her shoes and a drawer of padded bras. Any sign of her life as a superstar has been scrubbed, with the exception of a postcard from Reba McEntire. She rifles around in her armoire (careful not to show its contents, which she considers too messy for guests) and pulls out a cardboard box of colored wax, which she used to seal envelopes.

"I wrote my Valentine's Day cards yesterday," she says, holding up a thick stack. "It's not going to be a big shindig for me. I didn't have that one person." She smiles. "So I had to write 30."

It's almost 8 p.m. and Taylor is planning to work on her set lists for a few hours tonight, but first she needs a Frappuccino. She hasn't started her car, a champagne-colored Lexus, in a couple of months (her brother has to jump-start it) and when we finally pull out onto the road, she seems a little less perfect. She's an unsure, semi-reckless driver, hitting the brake too hard, pointing the car this way and that at various intersections like she's tacking a boat. She screams, "Five-oh!" as she spots a cop, then pulls into a drive-through Starbucks.

"I've been in three accidents, but none of them were my fault," she wails, slurping from her vanilla Frappuccino as I sip on my hazelnut one.

Soon she comes to a complete stop, pointing to an expanse of lawn.

"This summer, the guy from the _Fifteen_ song came back into Abigail's life," she informs me. "He got me to bring her here, and while we were on the way he texted her 'We need to talk.' When they arrived, the guy was standing in the center of this field in a big heart made of candles, holding a bunch of roses. It was _so_ romantic," she gushes, smiling dreamily. "I love that kind of stuff."

Then we start pulling away.

"You know, I totally burned a CD for him to play that night, because he wouldn't have known Abigail's favorite songs otherwise," she says, tapping the steering wheel. "And as usual, I had to clean up the mess the next day." She sighs. "But that's OK," she says. "I didn't mind."


	4. Chapter 4

_One Year Later_  
 _March 2010_

Tucked away in a quiet corner of a clamorous steak house in midtown Manhattan, at a safe remove from the pin-striped after-work crowd, Taylor hunches over a notepad and contemplates her future. At the top of the page are four letters, M-A-S-H, denoting four categories of real estate: mansion, apartment, shack, and house.

Pretty much everyone under the age of thirty-five knows the game. Everyone except Taylor, who, although is still technically a teen (she turns twenty in just three days) and perhaps the most effective apostle of adolescence since Walt Disney, is not exactly representative of the species.

"I think I've definitely played it before," she tells me. "It's been awhile, though."

In person, Taylor's beauty is almost otherworldly, a slight contrast from when I last saw her just a year ago. Tall and whiplike in a red cashmere sweater from Topshop, black Citizens of Humanity jeans, and Rag & Bone flats (all of it topped off with that cascade of corkscrew curls) she appears almost suffused with light, like a stage performer pursued by a follow spot. Her manner is still girlish, but she's also extraordinarily self-possessed. She speaks in well-constructed sentences, pausing first to formulate her thoughts and unfailingly weaving the question she's been asked into her response the way media coaches recommend. And she's generous with hugs, which she tends to deliver sideways like a tall person (she's 5'11) who poses for a lot of photos.

Al Wilson, her drummer and bandleader, met her three years ago and remains awestruck. "She just _glows_ ," I remember him telling me later that night, shaking his head like someone trying to describe a UFO. "She has an electricity that's just profound, man. She's wired so well it's unbelievable." (According to her best friend, Abigail, Taylor _does_ have one teensy fault: an annoying tendency to clear her throat a lot. Though to be fair, nobody else seems to have noticed.)

Returning to our attempt at middle school fortune-telling, I ask her to name three cities she'd like to live in and fires off Nashville, New York, and Los Angeles. But when it comes to citing one she'd hate, Taylor hesitates. The last thing she wants to do is snub some random municipality in my semi-popular blog. She settles on the perfect answer: "Kablamphnar," which doesn't actually exist. I jot it all down, along with four numbers representing how many children she might eventually have.

Now for the tough part: Three guys you think are hot?

"Like, how do you mean?" she asks, scrunching up her face. She knows how I mean. "Um, well...Taylor Lautner," she says finally, a certain nervy resolve in her voice.

The eighteen-year-old Taylor Lautner, the other half of what the tabloids dubbed "Taylor Squared," is the impish, abdominally gifted _New Moon_ hunk who has played her beau onscreen and off. She joked about the relationship in a charming Saturday Night Live monologue. Her appearance, as both host and musical guest, was SNL's best-rated episode last fall, until, that is, he hosted the show and reciprocated with a Taylor shout-out of his own. During our interview, she declines to chat about him at all, and wisely so: a few weeks later I learn she cuts him loose, and a member of her camp makes sure _Us Weekly_ has the proper spin.

Back to the game. Taylor name-checks John Mayer and Carter Jenkins, another Valentine's Day costar, as her remaining hotties. I don't even bother to solicit a response to the last question: a guy she can't stand. I just write Kanye West.

"Oh my God, no you didn't!" she says, her almond-shaped eyes glinting a bit. "You're so scandalous. Do we _have_ to?"

Relax, it's just a game, I tell her.

"Mmm, right," she says skeptically.


	5. Chapter 5

The day after our dinner, Taylor headlines the Z100 Jingle Ball, an annual concert at Madison Square Garden featuring a bevy of tween-friendly acts. It's late, and some fans are looking blearyeyed, out well past their bedtimes.

Justin Bieber, the mop-topped hormonal heartthrob, has just delivered a rousing set, appearing in a leg cast (defying doctors' orders, or so he claims, to a chorus of "Awww"), and it seems a tough act to follow. But then Taylor appears, skipping across the stage in black knee-high boots, belting out _You Belong With Me_ and Bieber Fever is soon forgotten. Within seconds, the only thing shinier than Taylor's spangled dress is the thousands of glinting braces in the audience as her fans, some weeping, sing along to every word.

After the song, Taylor stands there for a generous while, smiling radiantly, her slender arms outstretched, just sort of marinating in it. A minute or so goes by and, just when our palms are beginning to sting, she gooses the applause with the merest side-flick of her electric blue eyes and stands there some more.

As talented a performer as she is, I think it's her genius as a songwriter that's made her a star. Tales of unrequited crushes and teenage yearning, her pastel-color country-pop lullabies are (for the most part) stripped of grown-up temptations. Cozy, enveloping, and altogether irresistible, they're a perfect balm for a time when we seem to have run out the string on cynicism. Not merely innocent, they reaffirm the whole _idea_ of innocence, transforming youthful naïveté from a fleeting embarrassment into an exalted form of Shakespeare. Approach a song such as _Love Story_ or _Fifteen_ with an open heart (playing it loud, over headphones, say, while running through the park at dawn) and the impact is so redemptive and affecting and true, you might be moved to wonder why you ever grew up at all.

Not for nothing has Taylor been tagged the "anti-Britney." Whereas that other precocious blond songstress insisted she was "not that innocent," and then went on to prove it every way she could, Taylor is still a veritable Girl Scout.

"Taylor's the perfect person for this media moment," Scott Borchetta tells me once I finally make it backstage, journal in hand. He's the guy who signed her to a deal at his then-fledgling label, Big Machine Records, back in 2005. "She really is the girl next door. She hasn't been drunk at a party, hasn't been in any crazy photographs. In this moment of total madness in the culture, her fans know they can count on her."

Whatever experiences she's forsworn, Scott insists that Taylor is somehow more composed and sophisticated than people many years her senior.

"I think parents just go, 'Oh, thank _God_ my kids love Taylor Swift'."

Taylor - a committed abstainer who likes to joke about her cookie baking habit and is about to come out with her own line of greeting cards (there will be kittens, she promises, and glitter) - takes her role very seriously. One of her biggest fears involves making a bunch of bad decisions and embarking on a painful, slow, devastating tailspin. She discovered VH1's _Behind the Music_ and E! _True Hollywood Story_ as a child and remains a diligent student of the genre.

Asked to name the biggest mistake she's ever made, the only thing she can come up with is forgetting to scribble any diary entries during her week of SNL rehearsals. Still, she insists, "I've had countless opportunities to do some really bad things."

Let's say she chose to hang out with the wrong people, she explains, once we're finally sitting alone in her dressing room. They might influence her to make a bad decision, which would then hit the tabloids...

"And then people start combing through everything that I do trying to find the next mistake and misperception," she goes on, clutching her sweater sleeves with her long fingers and pressing her fists together under her chin, "which leads to more scrutiny. Like, if I go to a bar, even if I'm not drinking, who's to say that a source isn't going to say that I _was_ doing something I _shouldn't_ have been doing? So it's not only about your own moral compass, but the moral compasses of other people that you don't know." She pauses, noticing my dumbfounded expression. "You're thinking, 'This is a giant boatload of fear.' "

(I am, especially for someone whose album is called _Fearless_.)

"But as you can see," she adds, "I overthink everything. I overanalyze everything."

Fortunately, that analysis tends to demonstrate a Vulcan-like shrewdness.

"Taylor's a very rational person," her mother, Andrea, tells me upon entering the room in the middle of our conversation. "I was definitely crazier than she is. I know I had my first drink before I was eighteen. But it's not like she's really tempted. Her mind doesn't go there."

This spring, Taylor will have more treacherous temptations to contend with when she finally moves out of her parents' house and into her own place, a three-bedroom condominium in a Nashville highrise. It's just a 15-minute drive away from home, but still.

"Living by yourself, I mean, think about it. There's danger," Andrea says, conjuring a horrific scene straight out of a Final Destination sequel. "There's stepping in water and hitting the light switch. There's a bathtub overflowing. Just the whole safety issue..."

Perhaps most frightening of all, Taylor might get stuck in her birdcage. In addition to a Juliet Capulet-style balcony overlooking the living room, the singer (who's doing her own interior decorating) has conjured up a chill-out lounge housed in a giant birdcage that will dominate the great room. The only way to reach it, she notes excitedly, is by crossing a pond via a strategically placed stepping stone and climbing a spiral staircase.

"I just wanted it to be my fantasy world," she says.

Taylor is clearly a fan of fairytales, and it's not hard to see why. Doted on by loving parents (father Scott is a stockbroker, Andrea a former marketing exec who ditched her career to raise Taylor and brother, Austin), I remember her telling me she grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania

"Taylor's favorite thing to do was saddle up the pony for a trail ride or build a fort in the hay loft," Andrea reminisces.

She discovered country music at age six and began playing local events and karaoke contests while still in grade school. Then, after catching a documentary about Faith Hill, she begged her parents to take her on a trip to Nashville.

"I just got it into my head that there was this magical place that I needed to go to because that was where dreams come true," she says. It's become country music legend now, the way a preadolescent Taylor Swift marched into one label after another along the famed Music Row (while Andrea waited in the car with Austin) presenting her homemade demo tapes.

Like every fairy tale, this one has a villain - a posse of them, actually. One day shortly after Taylor, then twelve, played her biggest gig yet (singing the National Anthem at a 76ers game), she called her friends one by one, looking for someone to go with her to the local mall. No one could make it, so Taylor went with Mom.

Andrea remembers what happened next "like yesterday," she says. "Taylor and I walked into a store, and these six little girls who had all claimed to be 'really busy' were all there together. As a parent, there's no greater pain than watching your child being rejected by her peers," she says as I make sure to jot down the story in my journal. "But it made me realize, if she was ready to sacrifice being accepted and having friends for the lonely experience of writing songs in her bedroom and singing on weekends, it must mean a lot to her."

A year later, the Swifts were bound for the Nashville exurb of Hendersonville, and at fourteen, Taylor had inked a deal as a staff songwriter at Sony/ATV publishing.

She later wrote a song about that trip to the mall, and I defy any parent to listen to _The Best Day_ without reaching for a Kleenex (the way Andrea does every night when Taylor plays it on tour). Which points up one of the great ironies about her lyrical content. The girl doesn't so much employ romantic clichés as cherish them like a collection of plastic ponies, yet even her dreamiest love songs are actually tethered to her own life experience (names unchanged to punish the guilty). And despite having had just three boyfriends (including, most notably, Joe Jonas), Taylor seems in no danger of running out of material.

"I like to categorize the various levels of heartbreak," she chimes in, explaining that it ranges from level one, a simple letdown, to level ten, total heartbreak. "I've only had that happen once," she says. "A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums."

Pretty much everyone who knows Taylor says the same thing: What you see is what you get. They mean it in a good way. She's not hiding anything. It's all out there, on her sleeve, in her songs, her videos, status updates, Twitter feed. (Sample Tweet: _Just wrapped up a cereal party with my mom and dad at the kitchen table. What a night._ Which manages to be all at once homey, self-deprecating, and perfectly on-brand, with 53 characters to spare.) Her YouTube channel includes footage of her getting fitted for a retainer.

Orthodontia aside, though, Taylor is no fool. Whereas most recording artists have managers who guide their careers (and take 20 percent off the top), she makes all the major strategic decisions herself.

"We were looking around for a manager for awhile, and we realized, wait a minute...it's her," Andrea says. "She knows exactly what she's doing and exactly who she is, and all we have to do is facilitate her ideas." I ask her if she ever worries about how Taylor might grapple with the extraordinary fame that's now coming her way. Mom says, "I used to wonder about that, but I got an answer early on. She never talked about fame or money. It was always, 'What do I have to do today to get to tomorrow?' She's very evenkeeled. I feel confident that she has the temperament for it."

It's a sign of Taylor's media savvy and sophistication as an artist that despite her considered approach to fame, she's not afraid to take risks, from her choice of cover songs (Eminem's _Lose Yourself_ , Rihanna's _Umbrella_ ) and penchant for pranks (dressing up as Kiss' Ace Frehley during a show to punk Keith Urban) to her willingness to poke fun at her image, as she did in a sketch aired during the 2009 CMT Music Awards, rapping with T-Pain (sample rhyme: "I'm so gangster you can find me baking cookies at night / You out clubbing but I just made caramel delight").

That boldness, Scott Borchetta says once also joining us in the dressing room, paid big dividends during her early days on "radio tour", driving from town to town and playing her songs acoustically for program directors around the country.

"I told her, 'They don't like to put new artists right on the air,'" he recalls. To which Taylor replied, "Then that's the goal, isn't it?" Thereafter, every time a programmer complimented her music, she'd suggest an impromptu live broadcast. "I mean, checkmate," Scott marvels. "It was so adorable, you couldn't say no. It was deadly."

A few years on, the victims of Taylor's lethal charm are piled up like cordwood, and she's just getting started. Next on the agenda: a valedictory second lap of the U.S. for the _Fearless_ tour, releasing her greeting card line, reading the scripts that have been piling up since her SNL performance, and working on a new album. And when time allows, she'll hang out with Abigail in that giant birdcage.

And then? If M-A-S-H is any guide, she'll get married, move to an apartment in Los Angeles, and have 13 kids.

Note to John Mayer: Congrats, dude. Treat her well.


	6. Chapter 6

_A Couple Months Later_  
 _June 2010_

Taylor loves a lot of things, but maybe nothing quite so much at this moment as her new Prevost tour bus. "It's amazing!" she gushes, bounding through the backstage labyrinth of the Save Mart Center in Fresno, California, where she'll be performing tonight; long Goldilocks curls bouncing behind her as she goes. "My mom and I just redid the whole thing. Come see!"

Inside, the bus is a lush girly fantasy in chocolate brown and peacock blue, complete with a tufted brown velvet couch and pearly blonde laminated wood paneling, an electric fireplace ("Because I'm always freezing!"), a big champagne marble bathroom, and a Star Trac treadmill that folds up like a Murphy bed.

"We bought the old bus from Cher," explains Andrea, who goes on every tour, watching from the sidelines, keen-eyed and silent as an eagle. "So it was all black and gothic." For the new bus, she says, "We wanted to brighten things up."

In Taylor's bedroom, a big turquoise satin jewelry box has the word _Barbie_ written across it in rhinestones, and her first two multiplatinum albums shine above her silky, pillow-piled turquoise-and-brown bed like twin full moons. A sign over the door reads _Never, Never, Never Give Up_ in curling bronze script.

"Did you have that made?" I ask her.

"No. I got it from T.J. Maxx," she chirps. She may be the world's least snobbish pop princess. In Taylor Swift's world (or "Taylor Nation"), Urban Outfitters T-shirts and $900 Christian Louboutin stilettos are embraced with equal fervor. All the crew members are presented with cakes on their birthdays and serenaded by Taylor herself. And everyone (literally everyone) is greeted with a hug and an enormous smile. It's kind of like meeting Mickey at Disney World. The weeping 8-year-old fan in a pink cowboy hat gets a hug. The mayor of Fresno gets a hug. Even the sweaty, walrus-shaped teenage boy with the slightly crazed glint in his eye gets a hug (though when he starts pawing Taylor and kissing her all over her face, two beefy security guys step in and carry him off.)

"It scares the daylights out of me when she goes around hugging everybody," Andrea admits. "I have to turn my head when she does it during the concerts. But you couldn't stop her if you tried; she's just a born hugger."

Taylor's gasping love for most things she sets eyes on (Starbucks coffee, low-fat strawberry Pop-Tarts, and members of the band Def Leppard included) might get old quickly if it weren't accompanied by a big winking dose of sass that gives her a Tinker Bell-ish quality. At twenty now, she is tall and skinny as a string bean, with long, gangly white arms and a plump, angelic face. Her eyes are still blue as forget-me-nots, with that slightly Asian tilt and thick curling lashes that she flirts with expertly and shamelessly, like Scarlett O'Hara.

Though I know she was born in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, and lived there until she was fourteen, there is a specifically Southern flavor to much of her appeal. She loves flouncy miniskirts and candy-colored strapless dresses and halo-style headbands with silk flowers sewn on. She says "Y'all" and "Thay-nk ewe!" She prays. She bakes. (When she's home in Nashville, she regularly delivers homemade pumpkin-spice cookies with cream cheese frosting to the construction guys working on her new condo.) But there's a clear-eyed, laser-focus quality to her attention, too...you sense there's a mighty brain ticking beneath all those blonde curls.

"I love having a goal, feeling like I'm on a mission," she tells me. "I love trying to beat what I've done so far."

At the moment, that's a tall order. Her second album, _Fearless_ , was the best-selling album of any genre in 2009. An addictive confection of country/pop love songs, _Fearless_ stole the hearts of little girls and not-so-little girls all over America, sitting at number one on the Billboard Top 200 for 11 weeks, which is longer than any other album in the last decade. Come awards time, she took home four Grammys (including Best Album of the Year) and the MTV Moonman for Best Female Video (aka The Kanye Incident), along with a truckload of other trophies, including the CMA award for Entertainer of the Year in 2009. Last year, she earned 18 million from albums and touring alone.

Suddenly, Taylor Swift is an enormous star. Like, the kind of star people have started comparing to Michael Jackson and Madonna. The kind of star who tours with nine buses and several purple trucks that have her face plastered on the side.

Anyway, Fresno is an interesting place to see her perform. Basically, the whole town has gone bananas over her - including the mayor, who has officially proclaimed today "Taylor Swift Day." (In part, this may be an attempt to distract residents from the fact that Fresno was recently rated the number one Drunkest City in America by Men's Health magazine, but still...)

A dusty farm town in the middle of California, Fresno is the land of monster trucks and short-haired, churchgoing ladies in ruffled homemade aprons and Easy Spirit shoes who sell their crafts at the Big Hat Days festival in neighboring Clovis. Taylor, who does not drink or swear or flash cleavage, is huge here.

Outside the Save Mart Center, near the herd of Taylor Swift tour buses, a local radio station has set up its own bus and is broadcasting live all afternoon from a big loudspeaker. What seems like thousands of little girls and teenage girls and middle-aged girls are milling about in the parking lot (some dressed in homemade versions of the oversize "Junior Jewels" T-shirt and black nerd glasses that Taylor wears in her _You Belong With Me_ video) carrying huge signs and screaming "Taylor!" from time to time.

"I like her because she's young and pretty and she writes stuff we can relate to," says cute, freckle-faced Caroline Meyers, whose mother has driven her and her best friend, Lexi Kraft, here 240 miles from Colusa, California. Both girls are seventeen. Both are wearing T-shirts that say "I drive by my ex-boyfriend's house too!" - something Taylor admitted to doing in a CMT interview. "She's a good role model," adds Caroline. "Also, she's really pretty."

Taylor has performed in Fresno before, but never like this. The first time she played here, in 2006, it was at Cali's Frozen Custard Creamery out on Blackstone Avenue. Taylor, then sixteen, was in town for a promotional radio tour. She and her band stopped off for frozen yogurt and ended up playing an impromptu concert. The second time was two years ago, when she opened for Rascal Flatts. So when she appears later in the afternoon for a meet-and-greet backstage with the various radio people of Fresno and says, "I can't tell y'all how long I have been waiting for this night!", you actually believe her.

For Taylor, performing seems not so much a profession as a calling. Like being a nun or a Jedi Knight. It's the only thing she's ever wanted to do, at all. Ever.

"I have been singing randomly, obsessively, obnoxiously for as long as I can remember," say Taylor, who I remember grew up on that idyllic Christmas-tree farm with her own pony. The oldest child of her well-to-do parents, she insists that although her family believed in her completely, the burning need to sing in public was entirely her own. "My parents have videos of me on the beach at, like, 3," she continues, "going up to people and singing Lion King songs for them. I was literally going from towel to towel, saying, 'Hi, I'm Taylor. I'm going to sing _I Just Can't Wait to Be King_ for you now.'"

* * *

The next day we're sitting on the couch in her backstage dressing room, which she shares with her brunette backup singer, Liz Huett, and her redheaded fiddle player, Caitlin Evanson, who are also two of her best friends. They both feature prominently in the homemade videos that she posts regularly for fans on and Facebook, and they flank her like handmaidens. A big rack of bright, silky dresses stands against one wall; a forest of Louboutins spread out over the floor. A giant soda from In-n-Out Burger sits melting on the coffee table.

"It's very Taylor to want to share her dressing room," Caitlin tells me. "She just likes having her friends around." And while that's true, it's worth noting that toward the end of every concert, her and Taylor have a spectacular, hair-thrashing drumming battle on two big steel garbage cans during the song _Should've Said No_. (Taylor always wins.)

It's about 5:30 in the afternoon, and Taylor has just finished her preconcert rehearsal. She does not seem nervous at all. In fact, she seems downright relaxed. Dressed in a loose gray miniskirt and black Rag & Bone dance shoes with patent leather tips, she has been trying to explain to me what it's like to be born with such an intense sense of destiny, and how completely it has defined and driven her life so far. "It's literally all I've ever dreamed of," she tells me.

By the time she was ten, the details of her future had begun to fall into place. She knew she wanted to be a country singer. She knew she needed to go to Nashville to make it happen. She'd discovered karaoke and was teaching herself to sing like Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain. She had taken to performing at any event she could find, including garden clubs and Boy Scout meetings, which made her seriously unpopular at school. Taylor didn't care. She was on a mission.

"I knew that everything I wanted to happen could happen in Nashville," she says. "So it became my number one goal to get there somehow..."

And the rest is history.


	7. Chapter 7

_Two Years Later_  
 _February 2012_

Taylor is sitting in the front row of the Rodarte spring 2012 ready-to-wear show during New York Fashion Week. She looks prim, if not chaste, in an ivory-colored confection with long, lacy sleeves, a high neck, and a full-length skirt (a look from Rodarte's fall collection that was inspired in part by the spirit of the Kansas homestead). It is the sort of getup that treads a fine line between sincerity and irony, between too-literal costume and clever fashion reference. In other words, it takes a girl with a special sort of moxie to wear it without looking like Melissa Sue Anderson from Little House on the Prairie. The fact that Taylor is supermodel thin, towers over everyone (at five feet ten she clocks in at well over six feet in platform Miu Mius), and has skin as pale as the moon...well, let's just say she falls somewhere on the continuum from fetching to dazzling.

Perched here among the professionally blasé, she is all smiley gee-whiz confidence, full of hugs and exclamation points. Strangely enough, her opposite is sitting just two seats down: Rooney Mara, still in Lisbeth Salander mode, wearing all black and looking pale-to-green spooky. An editor sitting nearby jokes that the two could be the good witch and the wicked witch from _The Wizard of Oz._

As the models begin their procession, it quickly becomes clear that Rodarte, whose bad-witch aesthetic has made the Mulleavy sisters fashion darlings, has moved into Glinda territory. It looks as though they asked their casting director for an army of Taylor Swifts - lithe, pretty blondes with long, wavy hair, but wearing zombie makeup. Indeed, the entire collection (a parade of girly-pretty dresses, skirts, and hand-knit sweaters in a swirl of cornflower blue and sunflower yellow, with a few van Gogh Starry Night prints thrown in for good measure) looks as if it were designed for Taylor.

"I have never been to a show where I wanted to wear everything," she says breathlessly.

Afterward, as we plunge into the crush on the street to find her car and driver, I overhear someone describe the collection as "prom on acid." It strikes me that Taylor herself might be described as all prom and no acid (for a certain audience, her music and her look are still stuck in teenage gear.) Which is why it comes as a nice surprise to discover just how sharp she is now, two years later from the last time we talked. She is clever and funny and occasionally downright bawdy as we ride around town with a small entourage on this hot fall day, visiting designer showrooms.

Indeed, one of the first things she mentions is an infamous clip on YouTube that features a deadpan obscenity-laced narration. She knows every line, though she asks if her cursing can be off the record. She may be edgier now than her image suggests, but she is not Courtney Love. She still has a deeply ingrained sense of appropriateness. She also knows her audience, and knows that they aren't ready for her to grow up quite yet.

As we crawl through lower Manhattan gridlock toward Alexander Wang's showroom, we wind up in a conversation about how one never really gets over high school. If Taylor has been criticized for being somewhat arrested in her creative development (stuck in prom, as it were) that tendency has lent her an uncanny ability to capture in her songs the vulnerable mindset of teen girls everywhere.

"Why you gotta be so mean?" she sings in the straight-up country song that defined her amazing year in many ways and has been nominated for two Grammys. Clearly, her school days remain all-too-vivid. Taylor recalls when she was in fourth grade and her family first moved to Wyomis sing, an affluent suburb of Reading.

"So . . . middle school? Awkward," she says, launching into the first of many comic riffs. "Having a hobby that's different from everyone else's? Awkward. Singing the national anthem on weekends instead of going to sleepovers? More awkward. Braces? Awkward. Gain a lot of weight before you hit the growth spurt? Awkward. Frizzy hair, don't embrace the curls yet? Awkward. Try to straighten it? Awkward!" She starts to laugh. "So many phases!"

As hard as it is to imagine now, Taylor always felt like an outsider.

"I think who you are in school really sticks with you," she says. "I don't ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It's like, Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here."

When I confess I played the cymbals in marching band during my freshman year, she high-fives me.

"All of my favorite people, people I really trust, none of them were cool in their younger years," she says. "Because if you know how to be cool in middle school, maybe you have skills you shouldn't. Maybe you know how to be conniving, like, naturally." She laughs. "There's always that seventh-grade girl who looks like she's 25. And you're like, How do you do it? How do you do it, Sarah Jaxheimer?" She lets out a comically ear-piercing shriek: "Why is your hair always so shiny?!" (Later, I Google Sarah Jaxheimer, and sure enough, she has perfect, lustrous Jennifer Aniston hair.)

Taylor finally stopped caring about being cool.

"I think that happened as soon as I left school, when I was sixteen, because then all that mattered was music and this dream that I'd had my whole life. It never mattered to me that people in school didn't think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it, though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots."

Apparently, so do a lot of other people. A couple of weeks earlier I watched Taylor perform for a stadium of 50,000 people in Philadelphia, for all intents and purposes her hometown crowd. I had never seen so many teens and tweens and little girls with their mothers in sundresses and cowboy boots.

"I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote," says Taylor. "And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It's just funny. And wonderful."

The fact that Taylor, now at twenty-two, already appreciates the delicious irony in that speaks volumes about her grown-up sense of perspective. That she's also the only kid at the table when it comes to filling huge stadiums also suggests she has a heft beyond her years. How many artists can even fill a stadium these days?

"Um . . . Kenny Chesney, U2, and Paul McCartney. There aren't many stadium shows anymore," she says. "It's no small feat, and I know that. When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears. If you really take it in at the end of a song and you hear that many people screaming, it will make you cry."

Do you ever get freaked out?

"This is what I've wanted to do my whole life," she says. "It never freaks me out. Never. Ever." She pauses for a moment. "But you know what does freak me out? When is the other shoe going to drop? I am so happy right now. So I am always living in fear. This can't be real, right? This can't really be my life."


	8. Chapter 8

"You are so tall!" shouts Alexander Wang when he first lays eyes on Taylor.

"I think I am still growing," she says. "I haven't topped off yet."

Alexander discreetly checks out her look. "Is this Rodarte?"

"Yes," says Taylor. "It's from their fall collection."

"Well, it fits you perfectly." And then, handing out fashion's highest compliment, "You are sample-size!"

"It's really nice when I get on shoots and everything fits," Taylor replies as I stand off on the side silently.

"But I bet it also makes it difficult for you," says Alexander, "because they're probably like, 'Oh, she's sample-size, and that means she can wear anything from the runway collection.' And you're like, 'I am _not_ wearing that.' "

They laugh. Then the two head over to the clothes hanging nearby, Alexander Wang's futuristic-BMX-sporty collection that he showed a few days earlier. He pulls something from the rack that he calls a "knit racing sweater," and Taylor says, "How Tron of you."

"She gets it! I love it!" says Alexander, clearly charmed. They walk over to the accessories. "Need a motocross helmet?" he asks, who has designed one with flowers on it.

"That's amazing," she says. "You should send one to Pink. She would love that." There is something reflexively generous about Taylor, who says to Alexander as they hug goodbye, "I love how happy you are."

As we ride the elevator down, she offers her take.

"Some people just attract attention and excitement," she says. "It's kind of unexplainable. People study it. There's a science to the It factor. There are certain people who elicit a really passionate response. It's crazy. That's my Alexander Wang theory."

I've interviewed Taylor Swift over the past three years, and here are the things that I remember that still ring true: She was (1) smarter than the average bear; (2) excessively gracious; (3) happy to talk a blue streak about music; (4) preternaturally ambitious; (5) delighted to discover that the town her family summer vacationed in, Stone Harbor, New Jersey, is the town where I grew up.

Now, in the car on our way to Prabal Gurung's studio in midtown, I tell her that I was just in Stone Harbor with my family, having lunch, and mentioned that Taylor Swift is sort of from there. "I am _totally_ from there," she says. "That's where most of my childhood memories were formed." She goes on, "When you say, 'I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore,' people always say, 'Oh, really?' They think of the TV show. So I just say, 'A cute little harbor town in New Jersey'."

As with her music, there is a sprinkling of fairy dust on Taylor's childhood memories of Stone Harbor.

"We lived on this basin where all this magical stuff would happen. One time a dolphin swam into our basin. We had this family of otters that would live on our dock at night. We'd turn the light on and you'd see them, you know, hanging out, just being otters. And then one summer, there was a shark that washed up on our dock. I ended up writing a novel that summer because I wouldn't go in the water. I locked myself in the den and wrote a book." She stares at me, wide-eyed. "When I was fourteen." She laughs. "Because of a shark!"

* * *

Prabal Gurung's studio is tiny. Five people, plus the designer (with his muscular arms and a pompadour) and the place is standing room only. Taylor spots a photo tacked on the wall of a model in one of Gurung's dresses. "I love Karlie Kloss," she gushes and touches the picture. "I want to bake cookies with her!"

And then she turns and looks at the racks of clothes, the collection Prabal showed on Saturday.

"So, what's going on here?" she says, taking control. Inspired by the Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki's _Sensual Flowers_ photography series, Prabal's collection looks like a floral-print Rorschach test in violet and magenta and turquoise and black. "Very Katy Perry," remarks Taylor. She picks up a white blouse that is long in the back and short in the front and says, "A shirt mullet!" Finally she spots a skirt that makes her happy and sucks in her breath. "Oh, my gosh. This is beautiful. What made you think of this?"

"I was thinking, What is a strong female? Doesn't necessarily have to be tough. Could be pretty." Suddenly, Prabal plants himself directly in front of the pop star, who is easily a foot taller, and says, "Well, I am sure you get this all the time, and I'm sure it's redundant, but I am such a huge fan. I love your music. It's really beautiful, but you know that. But more than anything, it's the way that you have conducted yourself. Really. The way you handle yourself is incredible."

Taylor lets out a heartfelt "Thaaaaaaank yoooooooou."

"No, no, seriously," Prabal goes on. "Because it's very easy to get carried away into the wrong things and be like the rest of them, but you have held your ground, and it's really impressive."

Taylor throws her arms straight out - "Give me a hug" - and envelops him. As we leave, she says, "That kind of made my day. People don't usually compliment your character." She shakes her head in disbelief, and then a big smile spreads across her face. "And he had good hair. Good throwback hair."

One day not long ago, Taylor was interviewed onstage by Katie Couric at Billboard's Women in Music luncheon. At one point Katie asked her a question she has heard many, many times before, which is, essentially: When are you going to have some sort of scandal or meltdown, or, at the very least, an embarrassing photograph?

When I bring this up, Taylor says, "Ever since I was sixteen, the question that I get in every single interview is 'So, all the pop stars right now who are stumbling out of clubs and going crazy, are you going to do that?' When I was younger, I had to be more insistent with people because they would say, 'Yeah, they all say that when they're sixteen, honey. Just wait till you're nineteen or twenty. That's when it all goes off the tracks!'"

She clears her throat.

"But you know, as time has gone by, I've gotten that question less and less. I think, for me, the bigger pitfall is losing your self-awareness. Even though I am at a place where my dresses are really pretty and the red carpets have a lot of bright lights and I get to play to thousands of people . . . you have to take that with a grain of salt. The stakes are really high if you mess up, if you slack off and don't make a good record, if you make mistakes based on the idea that you are larger than life and you can just coast." She pauses. "If you start thinking you've got it down, that's when you run into trouble, either by getting complacent or becoming mouthy." She laughs. "And nobody likes that."

Do you ever lose it and act bratty?

"Yeah, but if I do I usually spend the next four days apologizing," she says. "I get post-conversation anxiety. 'I am so sorry if I said something weird. Did I make that weird? I am sorry if I made that weird!'"

I ask Taylor what she frets about, and her answer reveals a potential downside to being born with so much drive.

"I fret about the future," she says. "What my next move should be. What the move after that should be. How I am going to sustain this. How do I evolve." She lets out a big sigh. "I get so ahead of myself. I'm like, 'What am I going to be doing at thirty?' But there's no way to know that! So it's this endless mind-boggling equation that you'll never figure out. I overanalyze myself into being a big bag of worries."

But Taylor Swift is a girl who likes to be one step ahead of everyone, even herself.

"Lately I've been focusing on trying to be here," she says. "Trying to be who I am, where I am, at the moment." She laughs. "But, you know, I am having a big meeting with my team next week, planning 2013. Which makes it hard!"

Taylor splits her rare days off between her condo in Nashville ("Very Alice in Wonderland imaginarium") and a little cottage she recently bought in Beverly Hills ("Cozy, Anthropologie, grandma chic"). She's been spending time in L.A. because she's quietly looking for the right role in the right movie.

Does she feel pressure to work out?

"I don't ever want to be that person whose self-image overtakes who they are. I am _not_ a fan of working out that much. There's no regimen. There's no personal trainer. I love to go hiking because it's an experience. If I need to gain stamina for a tour, I will run every single night on the treadmill, but I don't necessarily like being at the gym."

Taylor is still very close to her parents, Andrea and Scott Swift, both of whom are still very involved in her career. I ask her how she would describe them.

"Mom is calculated, logical, business-minded. Kind but very, very direct. Makes you better by giving you these little pointers but doesn't baby you. My dad is a Chatty Cathy, the social butterfly; friendly; knows everybody in the whole world by six degrees; tells me that every performance is the greatest he's ever seen, every new outfit is the coolest. Constant cheerleader. It's cool to have pie-in-the-sky Dad, down-to-earth Mom." She seems to bring both those worldviews to her romantic life. As she puts it, "I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid."

Taylor has famously dated some famous boys (Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal). We all know that when she was eighteen, Joe Jonas notoriously broke up with her over the phone (in a call that lasted 27 seconds), an experience that fueled her songwriting. She wrote a damning song about John Mayer called _Dear John_. She dated Jake Gyllenhaal through the fall of 2010 and he broke up with her around the Christmas holidays.

When I ask her if she is seeing anyone, she says, "I got nothing going on! I just don't really feel like dating. I really have this great life right now, and I'm not sad and I'm not crying this Christmas, so I am really stoked about that."

Were you crying last Christmas?

"I am _not_ gonna go into it! It's a sad story!"

I ask her about her fourth album, _Red_.

"There's just been this earth-shattering, not recent, but absolute crash-and-burn heartbreak," she says, "and that will turn out to be what the next album is about. The only way that I can feel better about myself, pull myself out of that awful pain of losing someone, is writing songs about it to get some sort of clarity."

Taylor's music is not exactly straight diary entry (it's cleverer than that) but somehow the specifics of her past relationships continue to have a universal appeal. When I ask her if she can detail a few things she's learned along the way, she seems delighted to play along.

"I have red flags now," she says.

1\. "If someone doesn't seem to want to get to know me as a person but instead seems to have kind of bought into the whole idea of me and he approves of my Wikipedia page? And falls in love based on _zero_ hours spent with me? That's maybe something to be aware of. That will fade fast. You can't be in love with a Google search."

2\. "If a dude is threatened by the fact that I need security, if they make me feel like I am some sort of princessy diva, that's a bad sign. I don't have security to make myself look cool, or like I have an entourage. I have security because there's a file of stalkers who want to take me home and chain me to a pipe in their basement."

3\. "If you need to put me down a lot in order to level the playing field or something? If you are threatened by some part of what I do and want to cut me down to size in order to make it even? That won't work either."

4\. "Also, I can't deal with someone who's obsessed with privacy. People kind of care if there are two famous people dating. But no one cares that much. If you care about privacy to the point where we need to dig a tunnel under this restaurant so that we can leave? I can't do that."

Our next stop is Joseph Altuzarra's studio in the Garment District. "How did Alex's stuff look?" says Joseph, referring to his good friend Alexander Wang. "His collection was supersporty like mine, right?"

"It was great," says Taylor. "It was very race car-driver slash Tron slash ski slope slash parka, without-being-a-parka." They walk over to a rack, and Joseph picks out a very sexy black dress. "That is soooo Jada Pinkett Smith," says Taylor. "She would look great in that." She heads toward another black dress. "Ooooh. I like that. That's what you wear if you are a spy." Pause. "Or if you're playing a spy on TV." She holds the dress under her chin. "This is me if I was on _Covert Affairs_."

She pulls a sweater dress from the rack, and Joseph says, "You could wear that on _Covert Affairs_ as well."

"No," says Taylor. "I would wear this on _Without a Trace_ , if I was playing Samantha Spade." She laughs at herself. "I watch so much TV."

If at times she seems far younger than her age, Taylor can also seem far older. At Madison Square Garden in November, near the end of her yearlong, 80-city, sold-out _Speak Now_ tour, she invited Selena Gomez and James Taylor, two performers who couldn't fall at more opposite ends of the spectrum. Even though Taylor is "best friends" with the nineteen-year-old Selena, one got the sense that she was much more excited about (and has more in common with) James Taylor, the 63-year-old songwriting legend.

It turns out that she has a laundry list of iconic American figures to whom she feels some sort of connection.

"The only time in my life I have ever been starstruck was meeting Caroline and Ethel Kennedy," she says. "I got to spend the afternoon with Ethel a couple of weeks ago. She is one of my favorites because you look back at the pictures of her and Bobby and they always look like they are having the most fun out of everybody. You know, eleven kids, all these exotic animals on their property. I've read a lot about them."

When I ask whose career she would most like to emulate, she places herself squarely in baby-boomer territory, identifying in some ways more with her parents than with her peers.

"I look back and I think about Kris Kristofferson," she says without missing a beat. "He is so versatile and so appreciated for all of the things that he has done. The fact that he shines in songwriting, shines in his solo career, shines in movies and does it all so tastefully. I got to meet him last year, and he's just one of those people who has been in this business for years but you can tell it hasn't chewed him up and spit him out. He just seemed like the human embodiment of gratitude."

She ponders for a moment.

"Sometimes you see these people who are just so...God, so affected by all of it, where ambition has taken precedence over happiness. But when I meet people who _really_ embody this serenity of knowing that they have had an amazing life - James Taylor, Kris Kristofferson, and Ethel Kennedy..." She smiles her twinkly-eyed smile. "They just seem to be effervescent."

Whatever that means.


	9. Chapter 9

_A Couple Months Later_  
 _August 2012_

This is what it sounds like when Taylor Swift totally loses it: "Oh, my God. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD. OH, MY GOD."

Her summer tan is turning ashen, her very blue eyes are practically pinwheeling with panic. But she didn't do anything that bad just now, didn't start a nuclear war or curse on country radio or upload her new album to BitTorrent. We're on a bleak industrial road outside a Nashville rehearsal studio one stiflingly hot late-August evening, with Taylor behind the wheel of her black Toyota SUV, which she just backed directly into a parked car.

She's never learned how to use her SUV's built-in GPS, was messing with Yelp and Google Maps on her iPhone instead, realized she was going the wrong way, started to turn around, still clutching the phone, and . . . crunch.

"Oh, my God," she repeats, pausing for air. She takes another look at the car she hit. "Oh, is that my bass player?"

It totally is.

"It's fine, it's my bass player!" She couldn't look more relieved if she had received a death-row pardon. Popping out of the SUV, she apologizes to her bemused employee, a Ben Stiller look-alike named Amos Heller, who had been walking toward his now slightly dented car. "I'm gonna pay for it, I promise! I'm good for it! Oh, my God, Amos, I'm so sorry. I freaked out 'cause I went the wrong way and Sophie was gonna think I'm a bad driver and then I backed into another car. This is the worst interview she's ever had, already!"

One of her security guys, who was supposed to be discreetly trailing us, gets out of his own SUV, looking shaken: "You OK?" Soon enough, we resume our journey to a local restaurant, this time with Taylor following her bodyguard, who's serving as a human GPS at her behest. Problem solved.

She's still recovering from the whole 10-minute drive once we're seated in the small cafe. "I cannot believe there was a car behind me. I thoughts that - because I could only see the security car, and Amos' car was so low and I didn't look in the back camera and I was so sure no one was behind me and . . ."

The moment she crashed, she pictured herself being taken away in handcuffs, sitting in jail in her blue polka-dot shirt-dress.

"I have a lot of anxieties that end in me being put into a police car," she says, ponytail bopping as she shakes her head. "I am so, like, rules, and not getting into accidents. So this is just perfect."

At 22 now, Taylor is always waiting for her luck to run out. This week, her new single, the irresistible, distinctly un-country _We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together_ became her first Number One Hot 100 hit , and for all she knows, it could all be downhill from here.

"I'm always terrified that, like, something's going to happen," she says, "and I'm not going to be able to do this anymore and it's gonna all end in one day. Part of the fear comes from loving this so much and not wanting to lose it."

Watch her segment of MTV's Punk'd, where Justin Bieber goads Taylor into setting off fireworks from a waterfront balcony, then makes her think that they started a huge fire on a nearby boat. Her face betrays the same ohmygodohmygod terror.

"You know I had serious nightmares where I'd wake up in the middle of the night for, like, three weeks after that. I really thought that was it for me. I was thinking, 'Justin is 17, so he's going to juvie, but I'm going to big-girl prison.' "

She nearly made it all into a self-fulfilling prophecy during her performance at the 2010 Grammys, when stage fright knocked her voice flat during an awkward duet with Stevie Nicks on _Rhiannon_. Nonfans were instantly, and unfairly, convinced that she was an AutoTune baby who can't sing live.

"I had a bad night," admits Taylor, who's since refocused on vocal lessons. "It's one of those things where you've rehearsed over and over and when the camera turns on, the nerves kick in and you just can't think straight."

Mostly, though, it's been a smooth ride, with so few speed bumps she could practically tick them off on crimson-tipped fingers: She was terrible at fourth-grade soccer, couldn't parlay her height into basketball glory, never managed to do a split, had a hard time with math. There were some mean middle school girls, and more recently, as you may have heard, a few totally exhausting boyfriends. She has that slight overbite; at five feet 11, her posture isn't great. And yeah, there was that time Kanye West snatched her microphone and started yelling stuff about Beyoncé (still so not funny, as far she's concerned.)

But she's come to understand that life, even hers, is unpredictable, uncontrollable. Messy. The Kanye episode helped her to "realize nothing is gonna go exactly the way that you plan it to," she says. "Just because you make a good plan, doesn't mean that's what's gonna happen."

Case in point: Later that evening, Taylor is driving back from dinner, singing along to Third Eye Blind's _Never Let You Go_ (which came out when she was nine), when, unbelievably, we get into another car accident.

This one is random, terrifying and utterly not her fault. As Taylor cruises down a four-lane street, what looks like an old Corvette blazes out of an intersection and veers into our lane, smacking the driver's side of Taylor's SUV, then speeding off. They were driving, as Taylor later puts it, like they had just robbed a bank.

"OK, that was my life flashing before my eyes," she says, voice trembling. "What is this day? This is some strange alternate reality where things just go wrong a lot. That was the second time today! I'm going to have a nervous breakdown!"

Her phone rings; it's her poor security guard, who sounds like he's already had one.

We make it back to Taylor's place, thankfully unharmed. There is a pond, complete with koi fish, in the middle of her astonishing, many-colored Nashville condo. It sits beneath a wrought-metal spiral staircase leading to a human-size birdcage that faces floor-to-ceiling windows, with a view stretching to the green mountains beyond downtown.

"It's the most comfortable place in the world," she says of the wooden cage, built from a sketch she made. "It's just, like, pillows and comfiness."

Under the previous owner, this was an ultramodern bachelor pad. Over 18 months of remodeling, Taylor gave the condo a sex change and a heavy dose of well-funded OCD whimsy. The ceiling is arranged in multiple motifs - billowing curtains here, a painted indigo night sky there. In one corner, under hanging crystalline stars, sits a giant bunny made of moss. He's wearing a hat.

"It's a whole Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland structure here," she says as she gives me a personal tour. "It's what the inside of my brain looks like, essentially."

On the custom-built walls (some brick, some purple-wallpapered) are an endless array of photographs in ornate gold frames, some with matching gold-cursive captions: Taylor with her high school friend Abigail (complete with lyrics from _Fifteen_ , in which said friend gave a boy "everything she had"); Taylor with James Taylor; Taylor making that heart-hand-symbol thing with buddy and Bieber-fräulein Selena Gomez. Above the fireplace, which is emblazoned with a small heart, there's even a photo of the moment Kanye stormed her VMA stage (captioned, "Life is full of little interruptions," a phrase that's also in the liner notes of her last album), right next to what is presumably the actual award in question under glass.

The place is immaculate, and there's no sign that any other living thing - besides her unusually friendly Scottish fold cat, Meredith (named after a favorite Grey's Anatomy character) - has been here recently. But a gossip item circulating that morning suggests otherwise. As the story goes, she missed her boyfriend, 18-year-old Conor Kennedy, an incoming prep-school senior, so she "kidnapped" him, via private jet, flying him to Nashville.

Taylor stopped reading her own press after the Grammy incident, and instituted a self-Googling ban when I bring it up. "What did I do? Don't tell me! Is it bad?" she says, clutching a pale-blue knitted pillow and curling her mile-long legs beneath her on a swiveling love seat. She's barefoot, wearing a V-neck white blouse and high-waisted, vintage-y floral shorts. Her knees have some fresh white scars on them ("I fell on rocks on the beach, and I fell during volleyball. Kind of eight-year-old-child injuries".) When she hears the day's gossip, her eyes widen under feline makeup. She looks faintly nauseated: "How did I kidnap him? You can't kidnap a grown man! These are serious accusations, now!"

She laughs, but she's swiveling furiously in the chair, like it might move her away from this topic.

"It's an interesting way to spin something into a story," she says. "See, this is why I don't read stuff."

So is Conor chained to something upstairs, then?

"What, Sophie? God!"

She is aware of another recent rumor: that she and Kennedy crashed his cousin's wedding, then flatly refused to leave.

"I have no idea what happened there," she says, spinning again, fidgeting with some chipped nail polish on her index finger. "I think that story was based on the biggest misunderstanding, 'cause I would never knowingly show up somewhere that I thought I wasn't invited to. And I would never want to upstage anybody."

She's come to grips, sort of, with the fact that her days of exclusively good press are over.

"I just gotta take it day by day," she says. "I don't think anyone is ever truly viewed as only one thing, as only good, as only well-behaved, as only respectful. In the beginning, when there would be a tiny news story about something that wasn't true, I thought that meant my fans weren't gonna show up to my next concert. But now, knock on wood - where's wood? I need to knock on wood - I feel like my fans have my back and I have theirs."

And she knows that she can't always be the good guy.

"It's just part of the dynamics of a good story," she says. "Everybody is a complicated character."


	10. Chapter 10

It's not surprising to me to learn that Taylor finally had her first drink ever on her 21st birthday.

"I knew I couldn't get away with it until then," she says the next night, sipping a Diet Coke through a little red straw that matches her lipstick. We made it into the restaurant without fuss, except for a pigtailed little girl who gaped with I-just-saw-the-Easter-Bunny joy. "I didn't really care to know what I was missing, and I knew it was illegal, and that my luck would be that I'd get caught. And then you think about all the moms and little girls who would have thought less of me. I'm still not much of a drinker, but I'll have a glass of wine every once in a while." And has she gotten drunk? "I'm not gonna talk about that! No one wants to picture that!"

It can't be easy, living like this. Selena Gomez recalls going out to dinner with Swift when she noticed another patron eavesdropping. "She got startled that they were listening," Selena later told me in a confidential phone interview, "and she got nervous, and then the person left and she felt awful. She was like, 'I hope he didn't leave because of me. I hope he doesn't think I'm mean. Do you think he's going to tell everyone I'm mean?' She cares so much."

Taylor has recurring anxiety dreams, and, predictably enough, one of them involves being arrested for something she didn't do. "I keep trying to tell them that I didn't do anything," she says, "and they won't listen, or my voice doesn't work."

Another one is quite vivid.

"I'll be in a room with piles of clothes all over the floor, and I can't clean it. And no matter what, they keep piling up and I can't move. It freaks me out! It makes me wish I could clean it, 'cause I love cleaning. But the piles get bigger, or there's piles on the ceiling, and I don't even know how that's possible."

She knows what that one's about.

"I think I have a big fear of things spiraling out of control," she tells me. "Out of control and dangerous and reckless and thoughtless scares me, because people get hurt. When you say 'control freak' and 'OCD' and 'organized,' that suggests someone who's cold in nature, and I'm just not. Like, I'm really open when it comes to letting people in. But I just like my house to be neat, and I don't like to make big messes that would hurt people. . . . I don't want to let people down, or let myself down, or have a lot of people that I know I wronged."

Taylor has never seen a therapist.

"I just feel very sane," she insists.

It takes only a cursory listen to her songs - or a visit to TMZ - to figure out the one part of her life where she allows messiness to reign.

"The way I look at love is you have to follow it," she says, "and fall hard, if you fall hard. You have to forget about what everyone else thinks. It has to be an us-against-the-world mentality. You have to make it work by prioritizing it, and by falling in love really fast, without thinking too hard. If I think too hard about a relationship I'll talk myself out of it."

And why would she go from dating men in their 30s (John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal) to her current, SAT-prepping guy?

"I have rules for a lot of areas of my life," she says. "Love is not going to be one of them."

Before she got together with Conor, she was publicly touting her interest in the Kennedy family's history, and had mentioned reading that 960-page book called _The Kennedy Women_.

"Weird," she says. "Oh, my God, I know. It's like, things happen in my life in coincidental ways that are weird."

But it does look funny. . . .

"You're telling me," she says. She looks comically aghast at the idea of Elvis superfan Nicolas Cage marrying Lisa Marie Presley; he got the ultimate collectible. "That's not what's happening," she practically yells, sending her eyes skyward.

It may also help that a friend did it first. Ask fellow minicougar Selena if Taylor got the idea from her relationship with Justin (who's almost two years younger), and her answer is quick and cheerful: "Probably!"

Taylor has written some of her generation's most seductively romantic songs, she may be the world's leading proponent of kissing in the rain. "I love the ending of a movie where two people end up together," she says, who further explores this theme on a new collaboration with Snow Patrol. "Preferably if there's rain and an airport or running or a confession of love."

She's also written breakup tunes that, in their own way, rival "Idiot Wind" for mercilessness. _Dear John_ , 2010's presumed John Mayer evisceration, may be the most brutal: "Don't you think nineteen's too young to be played by your dark, twisted games?" But the new album's _Trouble_ comes close: "You never loved me or her or anyone," she sings.

"In every one of my relationships," she says, "I've been good and fair. What happens after they take that for granted is not my problem. Chances are if they're being written about in a way they don't like, it's because they hurt me really badly. Telling a story only works if you have characters in it. I don't think it's mean. I think it's mean to hurt someone in a relationship."

John Mayer had told Rolling Stone that _Dear John_ "really humiliated" him, and accused Taylor of "cheap songwriting." When I first try to ask her about that over dinner, she literally presses her hands against her ears.

"Be kind, and don't tell me."

The next day, I'm unkind enough to relay John Mayer's quotes, and she turns steely.

"I didn't write his first and last name in the song! So that's him taking it on...when he had an album to promote."

But didn't she use his first name?

"I didn't say anything about the person's identity. _Dear John_ is a well-known concept."

And why not just pick up the phone and tell these guys off directly? She looks at me like I'm insane.

"What's the fun in that?"

("She's so tough," Selena said to me. "Sometimes she'll tell me, like, 'You should be a little mean sometimes.' ")

In addition to heavy rom-com viewing (Love Actually is her favorite), Taylor's daunting ideal of love comes from her maternal grandparents, who were married for 51 years, and died a week apart. "They were still madly in love with each other in their eighties," she gushes.

There are no mere hookups in Swift-land.

"No," she says, nose wrinkling. "Where's the romance? Where's the magic in that? I'm just not that girl." And by the way, hackers shouldn't bother with her cellphone: "There's interesting things on there, like text messages," she says. "But you wouldn't find any naked pictures."

She's uncomfortable discussing a line from her new album - "I'll do anything you say if you say it with your hands" - that seems to break new ground.

"I don't know if I'm interested in writing about, um, blatantly sexual things out of the context of how it affects a relationship," she says, then pauses. "Oh, I should just totally say that Dan thought of it," she adds, meaning co-writer Dan Wilson. "I could get myself off the hook so quick!"

Taylor loves the idea of long relationships, though she's never really had one.

"It usually lasts four and a half months, and then it all just disintegrates. Then I spend, like, a year and a half mourning the loss of it."

Eventually, she would like to have a lot of kids.

"Like, minimum, four," she tells me. "My fantasy has always been having a bunch of kids running around. I would love to become as dedicated a mom as my mom was." Which brings her to another recurring nightmare. "I have a kid and the paparazzi is taking pictures, and it's scaring my baby. And I know that I caused it, and I can't figure out how to stop it."

This girl sure has a lot of nightmares.


	11. Chapter 11

A few days later, Taylor is sitting in a dressing room in MTV's New York studio, wearing a fluffy blue bathrobe and borrowed hotel slippers, talking business on her phone. Her two beauty coordinators are ministering to her wavy hair with a flatiron as she speaks. She waves me in, mid conversation.

"I resent the idea that you can just start a sentence with 'respectfully' and then you can just say whatever you want," she says, sounding like someone with whom you wouldn't want to negotiate. "I don't understand how we resolve this - is it him giving points? Ah, OK, good call. Absolutely, if he calls me I'll tell him that. OK, cool. Mm-hmm. Yeah, respectfully." Instead of a manager, Taylor has a management team, which she leads herself.

Her parents, Scott and Andrea, both have business backgrounds and have been involved in her career from the start.

"I think my earliest memory is my mom would set up an easel in the kitchen when I was three," she recalls. "And she'd give me finger paints and I'd paint whatever I wanted, and it was always good enough. My mom would have conversations with me before I could talk," she says. "So I started talking really early." Her first word was 'yellow,' which had something to do with fellow tall creature Big Bird.

The rest is already a familiar story: She grew up on the Christmas-tree farm in rural Pennsylvania, became unaccountably obsessed with Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks, started singing and writing songs, and by age 14, persuaded her parents to move near Nashville. They signed to the fledgling label called Big Machine Records, founded by a former Universal executive named Scott Borchetta. Taylor's dad, a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, was a minor investor in the label, which was more of an idea than a company when they signed.

As she prepares to release her fourth album, _Red_ , Taylor is at the very center of pop, more than any other putatively country artist before her. That's why MTV is sacrificing valuable Teen Mom airtime to debut her new video in a live segment tonight. But first, she has to endure nine or so taped interviews with various network offshoots. Now in a tight red top and blue pants, she displays such ease with a parade of interrogators (and the random little kids who come by for autographs) that it's not hard to imagine her running for office someday.

"Really? I might have to be a college graduate, though," she says. "I guess I better start figuring out my platform." This ease with glad-handing comes from her father, who, as she says, "never meets a stranger. You send him into a room, and he'll walk out and go, 'Hey, I just met a guy on the board at Papa John's.'"

True to form, when I eventually meet Scott Swift again (an affable silver-haired guy in a Brooks Brothers-y suit and rimless glasses) he immediately goes for common ground, sharing tales of a brief stint in journalism.

Taylor's maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, was a professional opera singer who sang around the world. "I feel like my karma in life is being in a backstage area or being in front of the house," says Andrea, whose also in the studio and whose mother died around the time Taylor was signing her record deal. "We were in Nashville when she passed away, and it was a surreal moment, because I knew we were doing what she wanted us to do. There was a kind of passing of the torch."

Taylor is convinced she's an exact mix of her parents' personalities - she thinks like her mom but acts like her dad. "My mom is, like, all about the worst-case scenario," she says. "My brother and I call her Central Intelligence Andrea. If you have a headache, she could tell you 15 different things it could be, all of which end in emergency room or death. But she also knows how to throw the best party. She's also really compassionate and kind and disciplined and has a really good head on her shoulders for advice." Her father is the designated dreamer, though she won't say if her lyric about "a careless man's careful daughter" is autobiographical: "My mom thinks of things in terms of reality and my dad always thinks in terms of daydreams - and, 'How far can we go with this?' " He was the one who envisioned her success. "I never really went there in my mind that all of this was possible. It's just that my dad always did."

As Taylor waits for her video debut, racing around the room on a wheeled ottoman, network executives Van Toffler and Amy Doyle show up. Many smiles and hugs ensue.

"How huge is that single?" says Van, who's wearing jeans and a blazer, his hair slicked back. "It's like the most ginormous thing in history."

"It's the highest female debut in iTunes history," Taylor says. "I'm, like, what?"

"And you know," says Van, "or I don't know if you do know, but you're going to be closing the VMAs."

"Oh, my God," gushes Taylor. "I'm gonna pass out. What? When were you guys gonna tell me that? Thank you, that's amazing. Now I really do feel like I might pass out." She's happy, but there's a familiar hint of terror in her eyes. Ohmygod.

A viral video called "Taylor Swift Can't Believe It" shows her winning award after award, acting lottery-winner astonished every time, continually mouthing, "What?" (See Kristen Wiig's brutal Swift impression.) Needless to say, Taylor has never seen it.

"I really get my feelings hurt when people make fun of me," she says. "I never won anything in school or in sports, and then all of a sudden, I started winning things. People always say, 'Live in the moment' - if you really live in the moment at a big awards show and you win, you freak out!"

"Those are just her mannerisms," says one of Taylor's best friends, stylist Ashley Avignone. "She does the same thing if I tell her something on the couch at home."

* * *

The morning after the VMAs, we meet for breakfast in Beverly Hills (her security sneaks her through the back of the restaurant.) Us Weekly's headline for the performance was _Taylor Swift Gets Sexy_ \- because she wore shorts. "It's a really interesting idea that you wear shorts and all of a sudden it's very edgy," she says. "Which, you know, on the bright side gives you room to grow, I don't have to do too much to shock people."

It's 11 a.m. and she's totally bright-eyed and un-hung-over in her cream-colored blouse and polka-dot pants ("not shorts," she says, "that would be too sexy"). She skipped the afterparties and had sushi with her band instead. When she hears that Lady Gaga tweeted, "Swifty is so cute" after her performance, she offers a taste of jaw-drop-awards face.

"No way! Are you serious? I need to see that! Thank you for telling me that." She spends three minutes trying again and again to load the tweet on her phone, without success.

It would be easy to watch Taylor at those awards shows and conclude that she's a phony (in her terms, a cheerleading captain pretending she still belongs on the bleachers.) But if she lacks self-consciousness, that's the idea.

"I just don't want to live that way," she says. "I never want to get jaded, because then you get really protective and hard to be around. That's what can happen if you're too aware of people second-guessing every move you make. So I try to be as blissfully unaware of that as possible." She laughs. "Please don't ruin it. I'm living in such a happy little world!"

Taylor may just experience life a little more intensely than the rest of us, which is one reason her songs can hit so hard - along with the ache in her voice, and her instinct for the minor fall and the major lift. Her songs sneak past our emotional defenses because she has so few of them.

Taylor has one more thing to do before she leaves L.A. - a performance at a Stand Up to Cancer telethon, broadcast live on more than 20 channels. She has a bunker-buster of a song for the occasion, called _Ronan_. Her eyes grow wet telling me about it: It's the true story of a not-quite-four-year-old boy who died of cancer, told from the perspective of his mother. (She incorporated ideas from the mom's blog, giving co-songwriting credit.) Nearly every line is unbearably upsetting - it makes _Streets of Philadelphia_ sound like _Party Rock Anthem_. (The lyric that keeps getting me: "It's about to be Halloween/You could be anything you wanted if you were still here.") Andrea - blond, warm-eyed - passes out tissues as she rehearses the song at the Shrine Auditorium. I take one.

As showtime approaches, Taylor keeps her mind off the song, doing her extensive vocal warm-ups (which, at one point, involve actual meows) and discussing food options for tonight's plane back to Nashville. She's sprawled sideways in a director's chair; her flats have cartoon-cat heads by the toes. "Buffalo tenders? OK! And rigatoni with truffle meat sauce - can I get it with spaghetti, though? Rigatoni makes me feel weird. It's like a wheel, and what's it trying to do? It's like an unfinished ravioli."

Soon, trailed by a small entourage that includes her mom and her stylist, Taylor enters the theater's darkness. She stands just offstage, biting her lip, head down, as Alicia Keys sings. In a similar moment before this year's Grammy performance (which earned her a redemptive standing ovation) Taylor told herself, "This is either where you prove the people who like you right, or prove the people who hate you right. It's up to you. Put on your banjo and go play."

She un-hunches her shoulders, breathes deep, and walks toward the stage. "Come on baby with me," she sings with exquisite tenderness, over a hushed guitar. "We're gonna fly away from here/You were my best four years."

Taylor makes it through the song. But afterward she breaks into a jog toward her trailer, weeping uncontrollably the whole way, smudging her eye makeup into wild streaks. Ten minutes later, when I say goodbye, she hasn't stopped.

"I was trying not to cry the whole song," she says, shrugging helplessly.

Some of the event's stagehands were watching Taylor from the sidelines, beefy arms folded. Goateed, ankle-tattooed, wallet-chained, they would've looked at home wielding pool cues at Altamont. But they're soon frozen in place, transfixed by Taylor Swift, and by the time she's halfway through _Ronan_ , I catch one of them silently brushing away a tear.


	12. Chapter 12

_A Couple Months Later_  
 _December 2012_

Taylor is browsing a small guitar shop in the industrial-turned-hip Edgehill neighborhood of Nashville, her hometown. Hair swept up in a pretty ponytail and wearing a mustard yellow below-the-knee pleated skirt, a crisp white button-down shirt, and sea-foam green cat-eye sunglasses, she looks like she just stepped out of the French film _Amélie_. She seems relaxed and at home, glancing at the acoustics and making small talk with the bearded, jeans-clad owner about the cool art prints of Elvis and Johnny Cash hanging on the wall.

As we're about to leave, he says, "I just have to ask...are you...?"

Taylor smiles and breezily replies "yes." Even in Nashville, where country music stars are a common sight, he can't resist asking for a photo, but Taylor politely explains that she's in the middle of an interview and we slip out the door.

It's late afternoon, and we walk across a stone alleyway to a low-key pizza place, where we sit outside at a green plastic table and she orders a small margherita pie and an iced tea. For two hours, she enjoys relative anonymity with only two middle-aged men stopping briefly at our table-dads wanting autographs for teen daughters. She signs their scraps of paper with a friendly but quick "Here you go!" One passing fan, who looks about thirteen years old, glances excitedly at Taylor, who gives her a smile, but the girl's parents keep her from stopping.

As 2012's highest paid musical performer and the winner of six Grammys (and countless other music awards), she is nothing short of a teenage icon. But with her growing fame and fortune, her life keeps moving further and further away from the teen audience that made her a star... although she's trying as hard as she can to remain their patron saint. Ask her what makes her happy, and she immediately rattles off a long, G-rated list of favorite things: cats, oceans, hydrangea flowers, arts and crafts, blankets, fireplaces, changing seasons...

She's not lying, it's just that at this point you might think running a $57 million brand, taking the red carpet by storm in the latest designer clothes, performing in front of stadiums packed with screaming fans, and getting romantic with a Kennedy might edge out writing notes and people with green eyes (both also on her list) on her thrill meter.

Yet the childlike surprise and excitement that Taylor expresses so often (gently parodied by Kristen Wiig on SNL and Blake Shelton at the ACM awards) still seems completely genuine in person. She talks talks about her achievements as if they are happening in the context of a wildly improbable dream, one from which she might wake at any moment. And now she's added being a part of American royalty into her dream life.

A longtime fan of the Kennedy clan, Taylor told me a couple months ago that she was "obsessed with the history of JFK" and had devoured a 900-page book called The Kennedy Women. And in the seemingly enchanted world of Taylor: What Taylor wants, Taylor gets. In a few short years, she's become a part of the family. Even her icon, Ethel, the family matriarch, has remarked that her grandson Conor would be lucky to marry her.

Taylor didn't want me to go on record about her latest boyfriend (they've allegedly just split), but all you have to do is read between the lines and lyrics. There may be a happily ever after on the horizon.

Certainly, she's dreamed about it.


End file.
